Thursday, December 29, 2011

[Comic title: Wait Wait; alt text: You can't stab Karl Kasell. He sounds all slow and stentorian, but he moves like a snake.]

Sometimes Randy makes comics that make me think he's just discovered those games you play where everyone makes jokes based on a certain snowclone, except he doesn't have any friends so he just makes a bunch of them himself and then uploads them as a comic. Now, I like those games. They can be quite entertaining and more importantly help to pass the time in a world where everything is tedium--a world where the closest thing I can feel to joy or happiness--indeed, the only thing I can feel at all--is smugness.

The thing is, those things are mostly only funny at the time. There might be one or two that are genuinely funny, but you need to set up the flow of the game first. Most people with good taste simply leave the conversation in the past and move on. But some people--the Randall Munroes of this world--decide that the world needs to hear all of these not-really-that-funny jokes that seemed great at the time, all for the sake of the one or two good ones. But this isn't building up to a punchline. It's setting up the necessary frame of mind so that the punchline is something that you have a distant hope of finding funny. And the best of them--"wait wait, don't speak its name," in my vaunted opinion--isn't really that great.

Does it seem to anyone else that Randy's doing a lot more shotgun humor lately?

I like how he throws in the meme reference and Lovecraft allusion, just to guarantee that this terrible "comic" is guaranteed strike a chord with at least certain groups of people who will kiss the feet of anyone who so much as acknowledges the existence of things they all like to pretend are more obscure and niche than they actually are.

Also, why not "wait wait don't tase me, bro" or something along those lines. I don't understand why he didn't take similar phrases with a "don't ____ me" format and try to make some funny/ironic headlines out of those, as opposed to just picking out words at random and then trying to wring jokes out of the lame premises that resulted.

randall should consider changing the name of his comic to Wait Wait Don't Read Me or even Wait Wait Don't Laugh at Me, if he wants to go for the whole misunderstood nerd angle while still communicating the unfunniness of his site

why can't you guys just give him a break?, No one is forcing you to read his comics, and he's going through a rough time in his life.

I'll admit this isn't the best of comics, but we can all just cut him some slack -- if a family member of yours suddenly had cancer, I'm sure your coworkers would be sympathetic and not be too harsh on you..

so lets all just keep reading and wish him the best :), he'll get through this rough patch in his life, and he ca nget back to doing what he does best -- making smart, witty comics about math, language, and science!

1/10, 1:47. The ":)" and "!" in the final paragraph cancelled out the extra mark I gave for the absurdist mention of "coworkers" in the second paragraph. The remaining final mark is for being able to type English while having less ego than ALTF or those two schoolboy linguists in the previous thread (but I repeat myself).

I think one Randall Munroe has had the last laugh on you haters. Tom Batiuk, artist and writer of long-running strip Funky Winkerbean, just announced that when he retires from the comic next year it will be kept going by a team of Randall and one of Batiuk's cleanup artists. Comic #996 was probably timely in convincing Mr. Batiuk to select the xkcd creator from dozens of writers who'd have jumped at the chance.

Look for Munroe to recapture some of the geeky high school whimsy of the early Funky Winkerbean without short-changing the serious themes, such as the plight of wounded veterans, cancer, the plight of amputees, incest, cancer, alcoholism, the plight of the hearing impaired, cancer and cancer.

I don't understand this comic because I am not american & have never heard of this guy or his show. I barely know what npr is. i am fairly sure I wouldn't laugh at a, i dunno, series of headlines about I'm Sorry i Haven't a Clue on bbc radio 4. 'I'm sorry I haven't a Clue why i got Fired' 'I'm sorry I haven't a cryogenic [sic] time capsule' 'I'm sorry I haven't a plastic bag'. yeah. not funny.

I posted something on the forum about having a problem with the infantilising of the Megan figure and sexualising of medical treatment in the last comic and a couple of them got angry and one of them asked 'what exactly is your problem with sex anyway?' which I thought was pretty funny. and sadly perceptive. they might not think it's so funny next time a doctor gets caught molesting patients. 'but she wanted it, m'lud.' damn it, I should've said that to them. fucking esprit d'escalier. No that's not a translation test either.

To be honest, weaselsoup, half the games on I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue achieve about the same level of funny as this strip.

Anyone hitherto avoiding unnecessary familiarity with this septic isle could do worse than search for the Fry model of bargain-basement Wilde mimickry. He is what every BBC attempt to combine culture and comedy looks like today.

This is literally just phrases that begin with the word "don't". Almost anything could exist after the phrase "Wait Wait, don't ____". I hate to be hyperbolic but this is about as lazy as comedy writing gets.

I liked this one. I like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and enjoyed seeing it in a comic strip. I liked it so much that I was hoping I could see some comments on it and found this site. I like this site too. It is funny. I like xkcd and enjoy seeing it written about in a blog.

997 is up for quite a while now, and no signs of wikipedia having been Randallized yet.Even the cuddlefish hate it. This is the beginning of the end, folks.captcha: liess. "liesssss," moan the cuddlefish in their despair.

Are there any clever black people? I don't mean in the patronising "he invented peanut butter" sense but people who are really smart and black.

Same question for females in the area of entrepreneurialism. Not whorish "I sold rafia work online and now I have a chain of lingerie shops" or obeisant "I am a career civil servant spokespuppet", but of the likes of anyone from Hewlett and Packard to Dyson.

Although, yeah, I agree that the last panel (or even the last two or even last three panels) should have been left off. The only case in which you should actually show the outcome is when you're averting the expected (which used to be a pretty common smbc punchline, but I guess Zach felt he was relying on it too much.)

A couple of decades ago people started creating Internet-based diaries, reports, periodicals, etc.

Then a decade or so ago a new generation of netizens (go go Gadget '90s online vernacular) did the same but instead of using the traditional terms they called their works "blogs".

After not too many weeks I came to understand that "blog" was actually an abbreviation for "amateurish". If it was badly written, badly referenced, badly argued, or merely existing for cheap entertainment, it was a "blog".

If almost every regularly updated feature nowadays on the open Internet is called a blog, it is not because the meaning of "blog" has changed but because the quality of information on the Internet has changed.

When I say this site is badly written, badly referenced, badly argued, and merely exists for cheap entertainment, you should take it as a compliment. And everyone who angrily criticises it for suffering any of these qualities is merely lactating the hatred which sustains the regulars.

New comic: stupid pictoblag stuff. It doesn't have a punchline or say anything worthwhile. I shall proceed to sue Randall for my 15 seconds reading my comic and the 45 seconds I spent complaining about it.

I'm not sure if this has been said already, but I thought I'd make an out-of-band comment. In 993, "Brand Identity," Randy posits that bland white boxes would stick out really well on store shelves. In Canada we already actually have this (a store brand called President's Choice) and while they stand out from other brands as Randy expects, they're a total pain because you have to squint at the boxes to differentiate between similar products (is this Lemon Chicken or Chicken Chow Mein?)

As a result, pretty much everyone wishes they'd never switched over to the white boxes.

I am a feminine, bottom gay who happens to be Hispanic. I also have horrible RSI, though I'd probably insult my bedbound but still headstreong MS-suffering father-in-law if I were to call myself paraplegic. My extended family has quite a few Afro-Caribbeans but none of my direct ancestors are negro.

his dictis (ablative absolute for you linguist wannabes), at least I'm not a woman.

999 is very unrealistic. Any potential child of Randy would most likely be killed within a few months by tainted baby formula - Megan's lacteal supply having been depleted by the man himself - And thus would not have the chance to reach a stage of development where he or she may stand, let alone recognize many of the words that Randy uses.

Oh, well. Next one is the big 'un. Prepare your hyperbole engines and lower the blast shields to protect against the inevitable self-congratulatory mess.

FWIW a recent study determined that for 60% of US women who choose to feed breast milk substitute a contributing factor was their partner's lactation fixation. I thought my foot fetish was nearly mainstream but perhaps I've been sidelined by the knock-on effect of xkcd's popularity :'(.

999 is great (in a pathetically ironic way). I LMFAOd at seeing Randall "I'm a scientist" Munroe admit that his "love of learning and sharing knowledge about the world" comes down to reading stupid trivia off Wikipedia.

Not that there's anything wrong with browsing random articles on Wikipedia; I do it a lot myself, but I don't try and dress it up as a deep intellectual pursuit. Learning and sharing knowledge can encompass just about anything, but at some point you have to draw a line between learning that's worthwhile and learning that's not. I can learn about the antics of a group of 20-something Italian-Americans on MTV. Is learning something about the details of Snooki's life more impotant than Thomas Paine's biography? Possibly; at least I'm more likely to find an opportunity to share my knowledge about Snooki with other people over the water cooler.

also comic 999 is cool, it has a/ wikipedia b/ 'I'm really clever' - ('my love of learning and sharing knowledge? fuck OFF) and c/ 'look at me, I'm such a kerrraaazy random person, no one should trust ME with kids, I'm too unconventional & young at heart' and d/ the underlying suggestion of 'look at me I have sex lots of sex sex sex sex' and e/ those fucking horrible wheelie chairs with a stick figure floating in the air above them

in other words it has almost everything. number 1000 (or 1001 if he decides that is the special one) will be a chart about how often people google terms like cocksucking narrated by that fucker in the hat with a mouseover text begging the cast of Firefly to pay attention to it.

I think I'd no longer say xkcd sucks but rather that it cares for its readers. If the latest one had said "Reason #58 why I should never have children: Even if I could get a woman to stay with me long enough to raise children, I'd be deathly afraid they'd inherit my Asperger's and/or my obsessive-compulsive disorder. [alt text: and having one person occupy the bathroom 30 times a day just to wash his hands is enough.]"

Instead of being amused or admiring his honesty and daring, we'd all just feel bad. So Randall's lightening up a sad world on this one.

I predict xkcd1000 (or 1001, with a smug remark about 404 missing) will incorporate some form of thanks to his loyal audience combined with a quip on the general if-only-everyone-was-a-slave-to-the-love-of-science-the-world-would-be-great-(kinda-like-China-now-but-who's-watching)-but-it-isn't-so-everything-sucks res rerum.

also I think for comic 1000 someone should do a guide to xkcd forumites. there's several distinct types on there - the ones who think that mild criticism is blasphemy; the ones that go to a lot of effort to appear sneeringly sarcastic to those they disagree with, but aren't clever enough to pull it off; the mostly harmless sycophants; the dangerous sycophants (usually these are distinguished by having moving gifs as avatars, which is the worst thing in the world today); the 'look at me I'm so random and weird' goomhers; the intellectual snobs who think that the stuff they post is 'academic' and have quotes from other forumites praising them in their signatures...

the goomher thing has been bothering me a lot recently. it's a similar thing to the morons portrayed in xkcd 807 - it's some idiot who thinks that something they think makes them special, and that therefore a shared thought - especially one shared with an idol - makes them extra special.

It's the kind of person who says 'is it weird that I like hippos AND margarine?' They desperately want the reply 'yes, and it makes you cool and unusual and different'. They want people to think that they don't care about convention - hell they don't even know what's weird or not, that's how wacky and creative they are. If you say 'is it weird that I think...' WE KNOW YOU ALREADY THINK IT IS (even if it isn't even 'weird'. (whatever 'weird' is)) And at the same time they want to assert their difference and specialness and the superiority they think this implies -they like what they like *despite* boring bland society telling them it's strange. They're so misunderstood! And the fact they can't see how this looks to other people is the saddest thing of all.

this is the xkcd audience. It's mostly a disease of young people, to be fair, and many of them will grow out of it and wince if reminded that they once posted 'omg, Randall is so creative and special, and is it weird that I too get obsessed with plastic bags? omg soul mates' but for some reason it's annoyed me enough today that I typed all this out.

This maybe isn't exactly what you're talking about overall, 11:26, but your second paragraph describes this guy perfectly (from the 997 thread):

"I've just registered to point out the tiny quote from a character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld in article 4C. I always like coming across evidence that one of the people I like and follow is familiar with the works of another."

What really bugs me is that this guy seems to have missed that xkcd is full of pandering references to nerd culture, and Pratchett is certainly a part of nerd culture.

GOOMH Randall, I feel so validated knowing that you like [stereotypically nerdy interest]. Not everybody does, and I never would've suspected you did too.

weaselsoup, your first paragraph describes every forum on the Internet. There is nothing new under the Sun (that an Oracle won't predict (and chew up and spit out (there's an example of an annoying in-joke for another elitist group right there (anyone who made a LISP remark at this point would be similarly annoying (goomhAnonymous))))).

The GOOMH thing isn't that different from any religion or quasi-religion: you're either with Randall or you're against him. All the cool kids on the Internet are socially liberal ("BO is OK as long as you're rich"), fiscally conservative ("oppressing foreigners bad - cheap Chinese electronics good"), atheist ("I refuse to believe God is a pink unicorn therefore there is no God"), science-fans ("science has solved all problems except the ones it's about to solve if only we believe hard enough"), lacking in empathy ("I was born healthy and with high IQ but you're a borderline retarded paraplegic because you're LAZY"), materialistic ("see above") and read xkcd.

As a political commentator noted around 14 years ago, Blair was more Thatcherite than Thatcher; as a recent survey noted, the British people are more Thatcherite than Blair. The same surely applies in the US. xkcd is a Thatcherite's comic: arrogant, technocratic, inhumane and hypocritical. And Munroe, like Thatcher, barely conceals the root of its odious path: the terrible truth that its background is as one of the common folk, no better or (back then, at least) worse than anyone else.

I just want to say that I went to a £27,000/year independent school on scholarship, I studied Latin and Russian and various European languages. I graduated first class with a BSc in mathematics and later got an MSc.

' your first paragraph describes every forum on the Internet. ' fair point, yeah. xkcd seems to concentrate it a bit, but maybe I just want to hate them more because as you say, the comic itself embodies all that shit and celebrates it and validates it (and likes to pretend it doesn't) so it's to blame.

goomh 12:26 I had a scholarship & did latin & russian at school too. omg. wonder what people on xkcd would think about them letting you into a maths degree with all that liberal humanities nonsense on your CV.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

Frequently Asked Questions

Divided into two convenient categories, based on whether you think this website

Rob's Rants

When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.